Local Senate voting may be more interesting than local lower house results in federal poll

This month’s federal election seems unlikely to change the Hunter’s political landscape, though it may well change the nation’s.

Labor has held the federal seat of Newcastle since federation, and there’s no reason to believe that the current Labor incumbent, Sharon Claydon, will have any difficulty holding it comfortably in this month’s election.

But there’s still plenty to hold interest in other aspects of local voting results, particularly for the Senate.

The number of candidates standing for the seat of Newcastle (seven) is pretty much on par with the size of past fields for a regular federal election, with candidates from Labor, Liberal, Greens, Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party (UAP), The Christian Democrats (CDP), Animal Justice (AJP), and the Great Australian Party (GAP).

Only the GAP, formed last year by former WA One Nation Senator Rod Culleton, hasn’t stood candidates in Newcastle before, though the UAP and AJP didn’t field candidates in 2016.

For parties with no realistic chance of winning a House of Representatives seat such as Newcastle, one of the primary reasons for still standing local candidates is to boost the party’s Senate vote.

Every voter in NSW participates in the ballot to elect candidates to fill the six NSW Senate seats up for election at this poll, and the method of Senate voting is now similar (though not entirely the same) as for the NSW state upper house.

Contrary to widespread misunderstanding, political parties do not control how voters’ preferences are allocated – voters do this themselves, particularly now that registered tickets are no longer used for the Senate.

A formal vote for the Senate (on the large white ballot paper) now requires a voter to number at least six boxes above-the-line (from one to six in order of preference), OR at least 12 boxes below-the-line, from one to twelve.

Except for the GAP, all the parties standing in the seat of Newcastle have at least a realistic chance of winning a Senate seat – though the odds would be long for the AJP and a little less so for the CDP.

This election will be a normal half-Senate election for six NSW Senate seats, whereas the previous (2016) election was for all twelve NSW Senate seats, which were spilled as a result of a double dissolution of the federal parliament.

Because of the way that Senate terms are calculated after a double dissolution election, most of the major party Senators elected in 2016 will be up for re-election at the federal election after this one.

Three of the six NSW Senate seats at stake in this election are currently held by non-major party Senators (Greens, UAP, and Liberal Democrats).

Half-Senate elections require a significantly higher quota for election than full Senate elections, making it much more difficult for minor parties to win seats.

The Liberal Democrats are almost certain to lose their Senate seat in this election.

Both the Coalition and Labor are each certain to win at least one, probably two, and possibly three, of these Senate seats.

The Greens will be fighting to retain their sole NSW Senate spot, and their current NSW Senator, Mehreen Faruqi, will face election for the first time, after being appointed to replace former Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon, who resigned from the parliament in August last year after losing the party’s preselection ballot to Ms Faruqi.

If the Greens don’t retain this seat, it’s likely to be won by Labor.

The UAP, bolstered by Clive Palmer’s long and lavish advertising campaign, will be hoping to retain their incumbent NSW Senator, Brian Burston, who was elected for One Nation in 2016, but who fell out with Pauline Hanson and switched to the UAP in June last year.

They are likely to be vying for this Senate spot with other right-wing parties, such as One Nation and the Christian Democrats.

If one of those parties doesn’t win this seat, it is likely to go to either the Coalition or Labor.

The recent NSW election demonstrated again that an increasing number of voters are choosing to vote differently in lower and upper house elections, and this little-studied phenomenon is one of the more intriguing aspects of modern election behaviour, including in our region.

Sound and fury of State Election signifies little change for Hunter seats

The NSW election is now done and dusted, with all its sound and fury signifying not very much in terms of obvious political change in the Hunter.

While results were still being finalised at the time of writing, NSW voters have given the NSW Coalition its third term, probably with the thinnest possible majority (47 out of the 93 Legislative Assembly seats).

Labor appears to have increased its representation by two seats, taking Coogee from the Liberals and Lismore from the Nationals.

In the Hunter, all sitting members were returned with increased majorities. While both the Liberal and Labor vote were down across the state, Labor picked up positive swings in local seats (Charlestown, Newcastle, and Wallsend).

The Liberals also recorded a slight positive swing in Charlestown, but their vote dropped more than 9% in Newcastle and nearly 5% in Wallsend.

The Greens also lost ground in Newcastle and Wallsend, though many in the party are relieved that their vote didn’t collapse given the factional divisions that have beset them in recent times.

The media response to the election result has been intriguing.

Despite winning seats from the Coalition, Labor’s campaign performance has been widely criticised, while that of the Berejiklian government has been applauded, despite losing four seats (three previously held by the Nationals and one by the Liberals).

Certainly, against expectations of a knife-edge result, Labor fell short, and may well have blown their chance of winning in the nightmare final week for their state leader, Michael Daley.

But after the 2011 electoral landslide swept away 28 of the 48 seats Labor then held, most pundits predicted a three term recovery for the party. After two terms, Labor is well within striking distance for the next state election in 2023.

 (An interesting aside is that the former Labor state member for Newcastle, Jodi McKay - the current Labor member for Strathfield - is now being touted as a potential NSW Labor leader, despite the fact that she was instrumental in preparing the ground for the Coalition government’s decision to cut the Newcastle rail line and oversaw disastrous changes to our local bus system, and was duly voted out in the largest anti-Labor swing in that 2011 landslide).

While initial focus is understandably on the Legislative Assembly, where state governments are won and lost, attention will soon shift to the NSW upper house, which is likely to see several interesting additions, including former federal Labor leader, and now One Nation MLC, Mark Latham, who will have a parliamentary seat for the next eight years.

Data from Legislative Council voting in local booths can be a treasure trove for anyone interested in patterns of political behaviour.

What leaps out starkly from the data is how differently many Labor and Liberal voters vote in the upper house.

For the non-major parties who stood in local lower house (Legislative Assembly) electorates, the difference between their party’s lower and upper house vote is usually minor (e.g., Legislative Council votes cast for The Greens in the electorates of Charlestown, Newcastle and Wallsend are within a few percent of the Green vote in those Legislative Assembly seats).

However, Labor’s Legislative Council vote is significantly less (often by more than 20 percent) than its Legislative Assembly vote in most local booths, particularly in Wallsend, where Labor’s Legislative Assembly vote in this election is around 64 percent, while its Legislative Council vote is less than 40 percent.

Where are these votes - nearly a quarter of all the votes in the electorate - going?

The huge Legislative Council ballot paper offered voters plenty of choices, but unfortunately the Electoral Commission’s election night counting method (which bundled many of the smaller group tickets and all below-the-line votes into a single “Other” category for the booth counts) makes it difficult to draw evidence-based conclusions about this on a booth or electorate level.

This “Other” category, which will be separated out and counted at the central counting centre in Sydney over the coming weeks, comprised around 14 percent of the vote in the three local electorates.

Among the groups not buried in this “Other” bundle, One Nation recorded an 8.4 percent upper house vote in Wallsend, higher than The Greens vote there, and two percent higher than One Nation’s state-wide average.

The Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party vote (also itemised in the booth count) is on 4.4 percent, pretty much spot on its state average, but unusually high for a predominantly urban electorate.

It’s clear that many Wallsend (and to a slightly lesser extent, Charlestown and Newcastle) voters are quite happy to have a Labor government, but want a more politically diverse upper house.

However, the rise of the far right – in Australia and other parts of the world - should concern all of us, and this local drift toward supporting far right parties accentuates the need for a more politically aware community, where the beliefs, practices and policies of these kinds of groups can be exposed and discussed in a way that informs people’s voting preferences.

(* the voting figures given in this article were accurate at the time of writing, but may change as the final count proceeds).

Greens on the edge of political precipice

As someone who helped start and shape The Greens political party in the early 1990s, I find it sad and painful to watch the ructions that are currently tearing that party apart.

I should begin by clarifying that I now view all this as an outside observer rather than an active participant.

I’m no longer a member of The Greens, having not renewed my membership this year after 28 years of continuous membership.

This included eight years as Newcastle’s first Greens councillor (between 1991 and 1999) and many other experiences as an active member, including heading The Greens NSW Senate ticket in 1998, running as The Greens Lord Mayoral candidate in Newcastle in 2012, and filling many other roles for The Greens at local, state, national and international level.

Naturally, when people who know my long-term association with The Greens find out that I’m no longer a member, they want to know why.

My reasons have more to do with what was happening with the local Newcastle Greens group than with the state and federal Greens, and I made my decision not to renew well before the recent furore surrounding sexual assault allegations against NSW Greens MLC Jeremy Buckingham.

But I do recognise patterns in what’s happening now from my own long experience in The Greens.

The Greens are now mired in factionalism.

In the NSW Greens, factions emerged slowly from personality-based conflicts between key members in the 1990s (particularly between early NSW state MPs and their supporters), which then gradually merged with geographical affinities (e.g., country v city) and different philosophical and ideological emphases (e.g., individualist v collectivist and environment v social justice).

Mixed with personal political ambitions and agendas, mistrust, and plain bad behaviour, the divisive potential of this has festered slowly but relentlessly into the factional fracas we see today.

Ironically, some of the most factionalist members of The Greens are those who most stridently deny and decry factionalism. The bald, self-centred hypocrisy of some of these members in invoking principles that they have previously demonstrated they don’t really believe in is startling.

Another key problem for The Greens has been an influx of members who are attracted to the party from a vague sense of political affinity, or from friendship or social networks, and who join online or via mass on-the-spot recruitment campaigns, but who have little understanding of, or care for, The Greens four core principles (ecological sustainability, social and economic justice, grassroots democracy, and peace and nonviolence).

One of the key reasons for my disillusionment is that the four key principles on which we founded The Greens in the ‘90s are hardly known by many current members and rarely discussed or considered inside the party.

Raising them with some members these days is more likely to arouse a sense of impatience or irritation than interest.

In the early days, I was particularly attracted to The Greens commitment to “doing politics differently”. These days, The Greens have all but abandoned that project. They've become instead a process-averse organisation.

Some Greens members regard the very word “process” with thinly veiled contempt, with no apparent awareness of what this represents for a party with a professed commitment to grassroots democracy and “doing politics differently”, both of which are pretty much all about process.

The Greens are now paying a high price for this process-aversion. If the recent Victorian state election is anything to go by, they could be almost wiped off the state electoral map in March.

I still have enormous respect and admiration for the integrity and achievements of some Greens parliamentarians, such as David Shoebridge, who will head The Greens NSW Legislative Council ticket at the next state election.

I also like and respect Jenny Leong, whose parliamentary work I’ve admired since her breakthrough election as the inaugural state Member for Newtown in 2015.

But she made a significant error of judgement recently in using parliamentary privilege to override due process and call on Jeremy Buckingham to resign from parliament on the grounds that she believed the sexual assault allegations against him to be true.

Like Ms Leong and many other Greens members, my personal view is that the version of events outlined by Ella Buckland, the woman who made the allegations against Mr Buckingham, are sincere and credible.

However, I also believe in the presumption of innocence and the principles of procedural justice, and I don’t believe that my personal view should trump the application of these key principles.

It’s one thing to believe someone, and quite another to presume the role of judge and jury: that’s the pathway to kangaroo courts and lynch mobs.

And that’s the line that Jenny Leong transgressed in her understandable desire to stand in support of Ms Buckland.

In doing this, she has opened herself up to criticism from those who support Mr Buckingham, many of whom bear the greatest responsibility for factionalising The Greens.

I’ve witnessed first-hand how some of these people operate, particularly in Newcastle, and I know from personal experience that most of them have no real understanding of these principles, and no genuine commitment to them: for them, they are merely arguments of immediate convenience, readily ditched when it suits their agendas.

Today’s Greens party is almost unrecognisable to me as the party I helped to form, and I’m not sorry to be out of it, though it hurts to see what it’s becoming.

For all that, I still consider The Greens policies to be superior to those of any other parliamentary party, and on these grounds I’m likely to remain a Greens voter. 

I also know that The Greens membership still includes many talented, intelligent, committed and principled people, and I wish them well in their struggle to re-orient the party back toward its core principles, and to a proper understanding and respect for the role of process in grassroots democracy.

Ultimately, that's all that will save The Greens from a tragic descent into political obscurity.

Latest Throsby catchment plan now open for comment

The latest plan for Throsby Creek and its catchment is now available for public comment.

The 3,000ha Throsby Creek catchment includes many of Newcastle’s oldest and most densely populated areas, including the suburbs of Adamstown, Broadmeadow, Carrington, Georgetown, Hamilton, Islington, Kotara, Lambton, Mayfield, New Lambton, Tighes Hill and Waratah; and public parks and facilities such as Blackbutt Reserve, Lambton Park, Braye Park, Broadmeadow sports grounds, Newcastle Showgrounds, Tighes Hill TAFE and Islington Park.

The latest plan (the Throsby Creek Catchment Agencies Plan 2018-2024) is the third integrated plan for the catchment, following the 1989 Throsby Creek Total Catchment Management (TCM) Strategy, and the 2001 TCM Strategy.

The 1989 plan was the first in Australia to be developed under a “Total Catchment Management” approach, bringing the community, local politicians, and about a dozen government agencies and councils with various catchment responsibilities together for the first time to plan the future of the creek and its catchment.

Before 1989, the Throsby Creek that flowed through Islington, Tighes Hill, Maryville and Carrington was a dirty stinking urban stormwater drain that nobody wanted to be near.

The government agencies responsible for managing various aspects of the catchment had operated mostly in their own bureaucratic silos, leaving affected communities increasingly frustrated at their inaction and buck-passing.

Community pressure was instrumental in initiating the landmark 1989 strategy, and community participation became one of the hallmarks of the preparation and implementation of the strategy.

The 1989 strategy and its 2001 follow-up produced a rehabilitation program for the catchment that has transformed Throsby Creek into the valued aesthetic, recreational and ecological asset that it is today.

During the 1990s the Throsby Creek TCM strategy was regarded as the go-to model for transforming urban waterways around Australia.

As Newcastle projects go, it’s one of our city’s great success stories, and testimony to what can be achieved when a community is united in purpose and action – an all-too-rare occurrence in the past two decades of projects imposed by successive Sydney-centric state governments on often unwilling local communities, usually at the behest of sectional interests.

The plan now on public exhibition may lack the razzle-dazzle of its more famous predecessor, but it’s a solid basis for improving the health, amenity and safety of the creek and its catchment.

It includes sections on:

·         ecosystem health and biodiversity

·         water quality

·         gross pollutants (litter)

·         flooding

·         implementation

Among many other things, the plan commits to developing a Mangrove Management Plan for the creek, identifying a “trigger point” for dredging accumulated sediment in the main channel, water-sensitive urban design (WSUD) in new development and infrastructure works in the catchment, identifying further bush regeneration projects, further naturalising creek banks, and supporting community education and participation initiatives.

However, the most important thing about this plan lies more in the fact of its existence than in the detail of its contents.

The real threat to an urban waterway like Throsby Creek is that it will again be forgotten, and degrade through neglect.

Debate there may be over some of the plan’s proposals for action, but having a plan at all means that the neglect of bad old days before 1989 is unlikely to return.

The Throsby Creek Government Agencies Committee that has developed the recent plan, and will be overseeing its implementation, is chaired by Newcastle MLA Tim Crakanthorp, who initiated the committee in 2016 in response to community requests.

The committee includes representatives of City of Newcastle, Hunter Local Land Services, Hunter Water, Lake Macquarie Council, Roads and Maritime Services, TAFE, Port of Newcastle, and Port Waratah Coal Services, and two community representatives.

The plan will be on public exhibition until 13 November.

Copies of the plan are available online at the consultation website: https://yourvoice.hunterwater.com.au/throsby-creek-government-agencies-committee. Suggestions and questions about the plan can also be posted via this webpage.

Another Newcastle Council democracy SNAFU

Readers of this column will be aware that the record of some of the current batch of Newcastle councillors, including the Lord Mayor, suggests that they have little understanding of, or regard for, local democracy.

The most recent crisis caused by the council’s disregard for local democracy demonstrates the kind of problem that this lack of leadership creates and perpetuates.

The recent problem arose when the council released its “Birmingham Gardens Village Centre Draft Domain and Traffic Plan” for the area at the intersection of Moore St and Wilkinson Ave, Birmingham Gardens, in May this year.

The plan proposed a number of public domain improvements to the area. One significant improvement was completing the remaining missing link in the cycleway between Wallsend and the university.

However, the council officers who prepared the plan were apparently unaware that their proposal, which would remove most of the current parking (21 out of 38 spaces) available for Regal Cinema patrons, would render the cinema financially unviable and force it to close.

The Regal Cinema has become something of a local cultural icon since it was saved by a concerted community campaign after its previous closure in 2007.

It offers a unique local cinema experience, very different from the big cinema chains (if you haven’t experienced it yet, you really should, because its fame is spreading throughout film industry circles around Australia).

When the council plan was released, the Regal and its supporters conveyed their views to the council officers in no uncertain manner, via more than 2000 written submissions (a council record), a 450 signature petition, and many emails to councillors.

As so often happens in organisations and governments who want to tick the necessary public consultation boxes but don’t really want to hear, or have to deal with, what people have to say, all this seemed to fall on deaf ears.

Council staff gave no indication that they were interested in changing their plan to accommodate the massive expression of community concern about its impact on cinema patrons.

The Regal operators then applied to address the elected council via the council’s Public Voice system. This was initially refused, but was eventually granted after the Regal objected.

The Public Voice session held at Newcastle City Hall on Tuesday, 18 September attracted the largest turnout I can remember for such a meeting in Newcastle: more than 500 people filled up the council chamber, the overflow room and the corridors and foyer.

The meeting began with the council’s Labor majority using its numbers to refuse permission for the meeting to be filmed (for a possible ABC Australian Story), even though all the council’s meetings are video recorded for publicly available webcast.

As Independent councillor John Church (who voted against the refusal) remarked, “we’re a public democracy, so why shouldn’t someone be allowed to film us?”

The plan presented by council officers at the meeting was very similar to the exhibited plan, with little apparent attempt to accommodate the cinema’s concerns about the loss of parking.

Regal programmer George Merryman’s presentation on behalf of the Regal was followed by some perplexingly belligerent and bizarre questions and suggestions to Mr Merryman from some of the Labor councillors, canvassing whether the Regal wanted the council to do nothing in the area, and whether the Regal could turn a profit by changing their operating days and hours.

Some councillors, however, made pertinent observations.

Independent Councillor Kath Elliott observed that the council survey distributed as part of the initial community consultation process hadn’t even asked about parking.

Liberal Councillor Brad Luke observed that a significant part of the plan was attempting to solve a safety problem with pedestrians and cyclists (mostly university students) crossing illegally at the roundabout near the cinema, but there was no apparent attempt to understand the reasons for this behaviour, or whether the proposed plan would solve that problem.

Greens Councillor John Mackenzie also questioned whether the current plan would solve the problems it attempted to address, and noted that the council needed to find a way of doing this without compromising the cinema’s viability.

A few days after the meeting, the council released a statement saying: “The Project has been put on hold due to a number of issues raised through the Public Voice process.  Further investigations and community consultation is now required.”

The real issue is how and why things came to this point in the first place.

Despite the council’s statement, there were no “issues raised through the Public Voice process” that couldn’t or shouldn’t have been known early in any genuine community consultation process.

The issues involved were relatively simple to identify (if not to solve), and it should not have required a massive community mobilisation to have them heard and dealt with through a genuine community engagement process much earlier in the project timeline.

The problem is twofold: at the administration level, it’s Newcastle Council’s chronic unwillingness and inability to cope with genuine community engagement, and, at the elected level, it’s the gaping lack of leadership from the elected council in steering the council administration toward local democracy.

Margaret Henry: Commemorating a Great Novocastrian

This month marks the third anniversary of the passing of a great Novocastrian.

Margaret Henry’s death from pancreatic cancer on 9 September 2015 at the age of 81 left a gaping hole in Newcastle’s public life and in this city’s progressive social change movement.

Margaret and I were close friends, and in preparing to introduce the inaugural Margaret Henry Memorial Lecture, delivered by prominent Novocastrian and founder of Renew Newcastle, Marcus Westbury, on 12 September, I’ve had the opportunity to reflect again on her legacy to our city.

Margaret’s six decades of activism reflected her passion, commitment and care for people with disabilities, Indigenous issues, women’s rights, built heritage, history, and arts and culture.

Margaret’s contribution to Newcastle was recognised when she was posthumously made a Freeman of the City, Newcastle’s highest civic honour, in January 2016.

Forthright to a fault, Margaret could be – and often was - brutally blunt and never shirked controversy; if you ever left her wondering what she thought about someone or something, you just weren’t listening.

This trait, and the usual reproval and acrimony that is the burden of those who speak truth to power, earned Margaret many enemies and detractors, who were quick to brand her with derogatory labels like “whinger” or “naysayer”.

In fact, much of Margaret’s personal life was spent helping people who had fallen on hard-times in various ways, and there’s no shortage of heartfelt testimonials from grateful recipients of her care and kindness, which often changed people’s lives.

These aren’t the stuff of news, but those who knew her best were well aware of this side of Margaret.

Margaret’s public life also involved helping people, whether in the form of shepherding through Newcastle Council’s disability access initiatives, or helping out Young People’s Theatre after fire gutted their building 1995, or the many other positive social and environmental initiatives for which she was partly or mostly responsible during her two terms as a Newcastle councillor, and in her many other roles in local community-based organisations over six decades.

But it is true that much of Margaret’s activist life was spent trying to prevent bad things from happening.

Margaret was no Pollyanna; she had a finely-tuned and well-practiced sense of outrage, and if something looked like it might happen that she thought shouldn’t, she was right there.

From the destruction of heritage buildings in the aftermath of the 1989 Newcastle earthquake, to the more recent controversies of the Laman St trees in 2012 and the destruction of our railway line , Margaret was a sentinel of the city, ready to spring into action when needed.

In the early ‘90s Margaret founded Save Our Rail, which for more than two decades valiantly withstood the relentless campaign by local vested interests to cut the Newcastle rail line, before it was sacrificed at the altar of vested interest by a captive and incompetent state government under the guise of “revitalisation”, amid reams of dodgy documents, corrupted processes, and cash-filled yellow envelopes to local politicians.

Margaret took her outrage about this to her grave, and I have no doubt that she’s rolling in it right now about what’s happened since.

Margaret was a strong believer in government and democracy.

By all measures, people’s faith in the institutions of government around the world is currently at seriously low levels, and this disillusionment is both the cause and the symptom of a pervasive crisis in democracy itself.

This finds its expression in many different ways, from Brexit to the election of people like Donald Trump who are demonstrably unfit for public office, and to the tacit - or even active - support for the appallingly inhumane treatment by governments (including our own) against refugees, in open defiance of their human rights, one of the supposed foundations of modern democracy.

At the local level, it’s reflected in matters such as the failure of Newcastle’s Labor dominated council to implement election commitments to improve community participation, and in the council’s recent decision to adopt a confidential proposal to shift council meetings from City Hall to the new City Administration building without any community consultation.

Some of these things hadn't happened when Margaret was with us, but it's not hard for those of us who knew her to imagine how she would have responded in these cases.

I can just imagine the outrage that Margaret would have felt if she’d been around when the news broke that Newcastle Council officers had negotiated a formal agreement with the Supercars organisation to prevent elected councillors from accessing information in the council’s contract with Supercars, and at the apparent failure of the elected council to do anything about this even after this was known.

Margaret knew the value of dissent in a healthy democracy, and her outrage about such matters would have spurred her to action.

Another of Margaret’s characteristics that her close friends came to know, is that she could have a devilish sense of humour.

I fancy that Margaret would have shared a hearty laugh at the ironic appropriateness of the acronym that has emerged from Newcastle Council’s recent rebranding from “Newcastle City Council” to a name (to quote the Council’s public statement) “befitting the city’s stunning revitalisation”: City of Newcastle.

Stunning indeed. Margaret would have dined out on that one for a long time.

Community shut out of historic council chamber decision

Newcastle Council’s ruling Labor bloc has voted to relocate the council chambers out of City Hall to the controversial new council administration centre being built in Stewart Avenue, Newcastle West.

The proposal was listed as a confidential item in the 24 July council meeting agenda, without any forewarning that such a move was even being considered, ensuring the relevant business papers were kept under wraps until after the decision had been made.

The purportedly confidential papers were released the day after the decision, with only two paragraphs redacted.

The Local Government Act clearly indicates that confidentiality on a matter to be considered at a council meeting should be applied only to the extent necessary to preserve the relevant confidentiality, privilege or security.

But councils throughout NSW regularly abuse this, and exploit (or deliberately create) a modicum of legitimate confidentiality related to a small part of a larger potentially controversial item to hide entire reports and recommendations that are not legitimately confidential under a veil of secrecy until the relevant council decision is a fait accompli.

Newcastle Council has been at the forefront of this odious but regrettably common practice for many years under successive political administrations.

It’s usually a sure sign that senior council staff are worried that the case they are arguing has dubious merit, which might be exposed under the gaze of public scrutiny.

Putting a stop to it would be a doddle for any elected council with a half-serious commitment to open and transparent governance, but we haven’t seen such a beast in these parts for a very long time.

The current Labor Lord Mayor, Nuatali Nelmes, led the charge in support of the staff recommendation to relocate the council chambers, dutifully supported by her six Labor colleagues.

In a 7-6 vote, all the non-Labor (Independent, Liberal and Green) councillors voted against the recommendation on the grounds that the associated cost estimates (which remain confidential) were both too high and too vague, that the current chambers are a more appropriate council meeting place, and that the case for moving the chambers is not persuasive.

The staff report argued for relocating the chamber primarily on the grounds that the 1.6km between the new administration building in Newcastle West and the existing chamber would “create work inefficiencies and be counter-productive to the intended objectives of the relocation” of the council administration.

Watching the webcast, I found it hard to disagree with the dissenters, particularly when the main argument for relocation was essentially that it better suited council staff to have the chambers and Lord Mayor’s office close by.

Both the staff report and the contributions of Labor councillors to the council debate were silent on anything to do with local democracy, which is usually better served by creating and maintaining an appropriate distance between elected representatives and the council administration.

Moving the council chambers into the city administration space is a bleak illustration of the extent to which the current Labor bloc has drifted into (or even actively embraced) administrative capture - all, of course, under the usual guise of “teamwork”.

What fascinated me most in watching the debate was that even those who spoke against the proposal made no reference to the fact that such a momentous decision was being made without any community engagement or input.

Council chambers are the main arena of local democratic governance, the primary space in which – for better or worse – our elected representatives perform their key collective role as members of our city’s governing body.

It’s both a practical and deeply symbolic space, and much can be gleaned of a council’s history and organisational culture by observing the décor, spatial layout and seating arrangements of its chambers.

Notwithstanding the endemic abuse of confidentiality to shut out the public, it’s primarily a public space, where members of the community have an often exercised legal right to attend and witness local democracy in action.

I’m no nostalgic traditionalist, and I’ve been critical in the past of aspects of the current Newcastle Council chambers.

But the space has operated as an elected council chamber since 1929 and has a rich cultural history that belongs to the whole city community.

The meetings that take place there draw from and participate in the living heritage and symbolic gravitas that it has come to embody.

A decision about its future deserves more respect than to be slipped into a council meeting under dubious confidentiality, and dealt with in a single meeting without a skerrick of community input.

In a healthy local democracy, it should be second nature for elected representatives who are the temporary custodians of such a space on our behalf to at least think to consult with their community on such a significant decision about its future.

If the case for moving the chambers is genuinely persuasive, most of the community would support it, and local democracy would be healthier for the shared ownership of the decision.

Alas, not a single councillor stood up and said “given the nature and significance of these chambers and what is being proposed here, shouldn’t we at least let our community know what we’re thinking of doing, and ask them what they reckon?”

The staff report released the following day proposes handing the existing chambers, Lord Mayor's Office and Lord Mayor's Reception Room to the Museum “for future heritage curation, preservation and reuse for commercial purposes”.

The first council meeting in the new chambers/administration building is expected to be held around February 2020.

New steps on path to Reconciliation

Earlier this year, this column was devoted to the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and its significance in the movement for Reconciliation.

The column observed that local action on these matters could circumvent the failure of our national government to take up the Statement’s proposals for a constitutionally enshrined First Nations advisory Voice to parliament, a Truth-telling process, and a Treaty. 

To my knowledge, nothing much is happening with any such matters at the local level in Newcastle, and Reconciliation Week and the recent first anniversary of the signing of the historic Uluru Statement from the Heart passed by with little local activity or acknowledgement.

However, state and territory governments elsewhere have recently stepped in where others have feared - or not sufficiently cared - to tread, introducing legislation that takes up some of the Uluru Statement’s proposals.

At the time of writing, the Victorian parliament is considering legislation to establish a First Nations body to advise it on matters affecting that state’s First Nations people, and to start the process of negotiating a Treaty between the state government and Victoria’s Indigenous people.

The Northern Territory government has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Territory’s First Nations people, at the ironically symbolic site of Barunga, where the then Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, promised a Treaty 30 years ago.

The Barunga Statement that triggered that unfulfilled promise now gathers dust in Parliament House in Canberra.

The current MOU is part of an ongoing process designed to culminate in a Treaty between the Territory government and the Territory’s First Nations people.

In the only Commonwealth country without such a Treaty, these are significant historic moments in our national journey toward Reconciliation. 

The 1960 Referendum vote removing discriminatory provisions from the Australian Constitution, the 1992 High Court finding of Native Title, and Kevin Rudd’s justly famous 2008 Apology for the Stolen Generation – the last two of which were marked by conservative panic about the end of Australian society as we know it - marked other significant steps along the way.

Key future destinations on the journey must be a national Treaty, informed by a national truth-telling process, and incorporating a genuine voice for First Nations people in national legislation (what the Uluru Statement, and other previous Statements, have referred to as “Makarrata”).

The journey will not be a smooth one.

Some of the opposition to the recent Victorian and Northern Territory initiatives show that some Australians would rather tighten their blindfolds than acknowledge the increasingly obvious truth about Australia’s colonial past.

The full extent of the injustices of that past are still being uncovered, largely through the efforts of historians and writers such as Henry Reynolds, Paul Irish and Bob Pascoe, whose carefully researched work has definitively debunked old colonial fictions that established and sustained the doctrine of terra nullius, and exposed the falsehood of frontier settler narratives about the passivity of Indigenous people and their ostensibly primitive cultural practices.

The wealth of modern Australia is substantially built on the foundation of this dark colonial past, mired in unresolved, and often unacknowledged and suppressed, injustices toward Indigenous people.

The recent moves toward Treaties represent a significant shift in government approaches. 

Until this, contemporary policy approaches to Indigenous disadvantage have focussed on so-called “practical Reconciliation”, a term coined in the Howard years to generally describe service-delivery models aimed at improving Indigenous health, housing and education.

However, the Federal government’s controversial Intervention and Closing the Gap policies (both examples of “practical Reconciliation” and supported by Coalition and Labor) have largely failed Indigenous communities.

Last year’s Uluru Statement from the Heart was a cry from Indigenous communities for something beyond previous campaigns for symbolic constitutional recognition and the failure of so-called “practical Reconciliation”, and toward structural change.

The pursuit of justice for Australia’s First Nations people is as much – if not more - a matter for non-Indigenous Australians as for First Nations people themselves, as Paul Keating’s 1992 Redfern Statement acknowledged.

The final words of the Uluru Statement are directly addressed to non-Indigenous Australians:

“We leave base camp and start our trek across this vast country. We invite you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future.”

After its rejection by the Turnbull government, the Uluru Statement is currently being taken around Australia, seeking signatures from ordinary Australians as part of a grassroots campaign for change (it hasn’t yet visited Newcastle).

In their own ways, the Victorian and Northern Territory governments have taken up the Statement’s invitation. What NSW and our local community will do remains to be seen.

Collaborative governance and the Greater Newcastle Metropolitan Plan

For anyone concerned about the state of democracy in our area - and if you’re not, you really haven’t been paying attention for at least the past six years – a proposal in the state government’s recent draft Greater Newcastle Metropolitan Plan is a shocker.

Once finalised, the plan will determine much of what happens with urban development in Newcastle, Lake Macquarie, Maitland, Cessnock, and Port Stephens from now until 2036. It will affect urban land-use, development approval, infrastructure planning and delivery, transport planning and services, biodiversity in the Lower Hunter.

The draft Plan was put out for public comment late last year and is now being considered by state government planners and politicians.

Despite significant flaws, the document has much to commend it.

Predictably, the draft plan contains the usual range of ethereal, high-minded, infinitely malleable statements about sustainability, growth, and resilience, and the mandatory buzz words (“knowledge city”; “new economy”).

It’s easy to be sceptical about all this (and I am), and to dismiss it as neo-Orwellian “newspeak”, designed to leave a warm inner glow, but without substance. But such plans do need to express the broad principles on which they’re based, and the general objectives they aim to achieve, so let’s cut it some slack on that basis.

Given the turbulent and divisive history of urban development in the Lower Hunter, it’s hard to disagree with the draft Plan’s support for a new model of collaborative leadership and collaborative governance arrangements, including improving coordination between councils, creating a Committee for Greater Newcastle, and engaging with young people and community groups who tend not to get involved in strategic planning.

All well and good so far. Then this clanger:

“Hunter Development Corporation will lead the collaboration processes”.

Say what…?

For those familiar with the role played by the Hunter Development Corporation in development and transport controversies since its inception, it’s hard not to see such a statement as either utterly naïve or cruelly ironic.

Throughout its history, the Hunter Development Corporation has acted as little more than the mouthpiece of the Hunter’s development lobby.

The current HDC operates as a “Chief Executive governed” growth corporation under state government legislation, and its current CEO is Michael Cassel, who was promoted to the position by the state Planning Minister from NSW Urban Growth, the state government’s property development arm. Mr Cassel’s involvement in Newcastle revitalisation project has been mired in controversy.

The Corporation previously operated under a General Manager, who was responsible to a state government appointed Board.

The HDC was set up under that model in 2007 by the then Labor government through an amalgamation of the former Honeysuckle Development Corporation (established in 1992) and the Regional Land Management Corporation.

In its various incarnations, the HDC has advocated both inside and outside government in support of the agenda of sectoral lobby groups such as the Property Council and the Hunter Business Chamber.

The HDC played a leading role in the state government’s decision to cut the Newcastle rail line, after recommending this action in its subsequently discredited 2009 “Newcastle City Centre Renewal Report”, which contained a deeply flawed cost-benefit analysis that falsified the relative costs and benefits of keeping and cutting the line, skewing the result dramatically (but wrongly) in favour of the outcome for which Newcastle’s development lobby had been pressing for many years.

The HDC report also falsified a Newcastle council decision supporting an “interchange” at Wickham (changing this to support for a “terminus”, which is quite a different thing), and  misrepresented the position of the University of Newcastle in relation to the future of the Newcastle rail line.

Worse, the HDC refused to correct these aspects of its report when they were exposed. That 2009 report (containing the above errors but without any correction or disclaimer) is still available on the HDC website, and has been (and still is) cited and referenced as though it is a credible and authoritative public policy document.

The HDC also notoriously mishandled clear conflicts of interest, with former senior staff having financial interests in properties directly advantaged by the Corporation’s decisions.

In this and many other ways, the HDC has demonstrated that it is an entirely inappropriate body to facilitate or lead any collaboration process, or, indeed, to play any leadership role in infrastructure planning or regional governance.

The relationship between the HDC and the region’s development lobby is reminiscent of the relationship between the former NSW Game Council and the shooters’ lobby.

The Game Council was abolished in 2013 after a review exposed major internal governance issues.

Our metropolitan area needs and deserves collaborative leadership that genuinely involves the local community in planning and delivering its future. 

If the state government is genuine about supporting a “collaborative approach” to urban planning and development in the Lower Hunter, and expects to gain any community credibility in pursuing such an aim, the HDC must go the same way as the Game Council, and the various roles assigned to it must be given to a body or bodies that have the representative legitimacy, required expertise and organisational culture to deliver.

Voice, Truth, Treaty: the Cry from the Heart

Resistance from the far right continues to impede Australia’s painfully slow progress toward some kind of reconciliation of our greatest unfinished business – the illegal and immoral colonial occupation of this continent, the dispossession of its First Nations people, and their ongoing oppression.

These days, January never passes without some kind of debate over the appropriateness of celebrating our national day on the date on which that occupation began.

In its most recent report card, the Federal government has recognised its continuing failure to achieve Closing the Gap goals aimed at reducing Indigenous disadvantage in areas such as child mortality, life expectancy, employment, literacy, school attendance and early education.

By far the most significant development in First Nations issues in recent times has been the Uluru Statement From the Heart, released in late May last year by a constitutional convention of more than 250 Indigenous leaders from around Australia.

The convention was organised by a Referendum Council appointed jointly by the Federal Government and the Labor Opposition to advise them on the next steps towards constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

The resulting statement (which is very short and which anyone can read in full on the web in a few minutes) calls for a “First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution”, and a “Makaratta Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history”.

According to the statement, “Makarrata” (apparently a complex, multi-layered Yolngu word) is “the coming together after a struggle”.

The Statement says that the word “captures our aspirations for a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia and a better future for our children based on justice and self-determination”.

However, despite coming from what was probably the most representative gathering of Australia’s First Nations people since colonial occupation, the advice the Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull had asked for was rejected by his government in October last year.

The government rejected the recommendation for a First Nations Voice on the grounds that it “would inevitably become seen as a third chamber of parliament” and that such a referendum proposal would have little chance of succeeding.

This response has been widely interpreted as yet another concession to the more right-wing forces inside the Turnbull government.

The Uluru Statement’s supporters – which include a significant number of conservative organisations, leaders and commentators – have questioned and challenged the government’s stance.

They argue that the Voice couldn’t possibly be seen as a third house of parliament, because the current parliament would set its structure, procedures and rules, and could change these at any time under the usual parliamentary process.

It would be a purely advisory body, with no power to disrupt or delay legislation. The significant thing that constitutional status would ensure is that the existence of such an advisory body could not become the mere plaything of successive federal governments, to create and dissolve when they wished, as they have with previous government founded Indigenous advisory bodies.

Comments from the Federal government attempting to defend its rejection of the historic Statement have been scant and superficial, with little or no attempt to provide any logical or evidential support for its stated reasons.

Its response shocked and dismayed many Indigenous Australians and their supporters, but – in the way of such things – it’s also galvanised them into action.

The matter of the Makarrata – the truth-telling and agreement process – is also still to be addressed.

Enacting this recommendation doesn’t require a referendum, but given the current federal government’s response to the constitutional Voice proposition, nobody is expecting much from them on this part of the Statement either.

As with many other issues, this may be an instance where local communities need to sidestep an unresponsive government and show the way.

In 1993, as part of the International Year of Indigenous People and in response to grassroots advocacy, Newcastle Council led the way in local communities working with Indigenous people in adopting a ground-breaking “Commitment to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples”.

This document spread quickly to other communities and councils around Australia, and had a significant impact in showing how local government could support and work with local Indigenous communities, and advocate on their behalf to other spheres of government.

Newcastle Council showed similar leadership on a national issue in the run-up to last year’s marriage equality referendum.

This may be another such moment.

The language of the council’s 1993 Commitment (and its 1998 update) is entirely consistent with the Makarrata concept in last year’s Uluru Statement, and there is no reason why such a process couldn’t or shouldn’t begin from a local community initiative, especially from a council with a progressive record in the issue, and which covers the area hosting the University of Newcastle’s Wollatuka Institute, one of Australia’s leading Aboriginal Studies centres.

Such a local initiative may seem a small contribution given the magnitude of the national challenge set by the Uluru Statement, but history shows that from such little things big things may grow.

Ambivalent regional planning decision leaves crucial eco-link land in limbo

The fate of the last significant ecological link between Newcastle’s Blue Gum Hills Regional Park and the Hunter Wetlands lies in the balance, after a recent ambivalent state government planning panel decision that is likely to stimulate further attempts to rezone the site for housing development.

On 9 November, the Hunter & Central Coast Joint Regional Planning Panel (JRPP) rejected a request to proceed with a controversial rezoning proposal for the 26 hectare site between Wallsend and Minmi known as 505 Minmi Rd, Fletcher.

Newcastle Council had previously rejected the rezoning proposal in December 2015 and in July 2016.

The recent JRPP decision was made under relatively new changes to the NSW planning system that allows developers to request JRPPs to review local council zoning decisions.

Despite its commitments to strengthen local government control over land zoning, the NSW Coalition government introduced these changes in August last year in response to pressure from the development lobby.

The announcement of the changes referred to a “strengthened strategic merit test” that would apply to proposals lodged under the new system.

According to the NSW Department of Planning, JRPPs would be required to assess whether the rezoning proposals were consistent with regional strategic plans and local planning strategies, or were “responding to changes in circumstances…not recognised by existing planning controls”.

The then NSW Planning Minister, Rob Stokes, said that the new system would “end the absurd situation of proposals rising like zombies again and again in an endless cycle of amendments and resubmissions during the review process”.

In the case of 505 Minmi Rd, the effect is likely to be the opposite, with the proponent indicating to local media that the panel’s rejection was “just another step in a very long process, but we’ll certainly continue to pursue it,” and that “we just need to finesse or amend the current proposal so it’s acceptable.”

Part – though certainly not all – of the problem lies in the system itself, and the way the panel has applied the strategic merit test.

According to the minutes of the panel meeting (which can be found on the JRPP website), the panel did not support proceeding with the rezoning review proposal because the current proposal lacked sufficient “site-specific” merit, another assessment filter in the new system.

However – and more worryingly - the minutes also record that the panel agreed that the proposal met the “strategic merit” test.

The minutes provide very little insight into why panel members thought this. Presumably, they accepted the case argued by the developer and the NSW Department of Planning that the proposal complies with various regional and local planning strategies.

But herein lies a key part of the problem. These strategic planning documents (such as the Hunter Regional Plan 2034) make very broad statements about broad objectives, such as the need for housing and infrastructure, and the need to protect natural areas and biodiversity.

They indicate areas of land already committed for either development or conservation, but unprotected bushland areas beyond the current reach of the Hunter’s urban expansion, are vulnerable to development.

Developers and land speculators can find plenty in these broad strategic documents to justify pretty much any rezoning in unprotected bushland near the urban fringe that might suit their financial objectives.

Environmentalists can also point to the need identified in these strategic plans for conservation lands, and for corridors and “green grids” linking various significant vegetated areas.

The fact is that these broad strategic planning documents provide support for entirely contradictory alternatives for the future of any bushland sites in urban fringe areas such those in or near Blue Gum Hills and Fletcher.

In the case of 505 Minmi Rd, the proponent naturally focussed on those elements in the strategic planning documents that support housing development. 

But these documents, including the most recent Hunter Regional Plan, also provide plenty of strategic grounds for conserving the 26 hectare site for conservation purposes.

Given that almost all the land between the Blue Gum Hills Regional Park and the Hexham Wetlands has been developed for housing, and that 505 Minmi Rd provides the sole remaining significant vegetated link between these two natural areas, it’s hard to see how any reasonable consideration of the relative strategic merits of using the site for housing development or conservation would not come down very much in favour of conservation.

However, there is little evidence of this kind of thinking in the recorded deliberations of the JRPP meeting, at which the panellists apparently agreed unanimously that the proposal to rezone this crucial environmental site for housing had “wide strategic merit”.

It’s highly likely that we’ll hear more about 505 Minmi Rd over the next year or so. Let’s hope that panel members, who are ostensibly there to apply planning principles to protect the public interest, manage to see beyond facile arguments put by vested interests.

Labor wins Newcastle Council election

The recent Newcastle Council election has given the city its first Labor controlled council since the early 1990s.

After their bitter experience of Jeff McCloy’s brief and dramatic stint as Newcastle Lord Mayor from September 2012 until his ICAC-induced resignation in August 2014, Newcastle voters returned to what they knew in the subsequent 2014 Lord Mayoral and 2015 Ward 3 by-elections.

In September’s election, Labor’s Nuatali Nelmes was reelected Lord Mayor, and Labor won one seat in Wards 1 and 2, and two seats in Wards 3 and 4, increasing their council representation from five to seven.

Sitting Labor councillors Declan Clausen (Ward 3) and Jason Dunne (Ward 4) have been joined by newcomers Emma White (Ward 1), Carol Duncan (Ward 2), Peta Baartz (Ward 3) and Matthew Byrne (Ward 4).

Depending on who you’re listening to, Labor’s electoral success was either a ringing endorsement of Labor’s management of council over the past three years, or a consolidation of voter retreat to the devil they know, the least worst alternative after the debacle of the McCloy experiment.

The expected close challenge from the key conservative Independent group led by Lord Mayoral and Ward 2 candidate Kath Elliott didn’t materialise, with Elliott achieving less than half of Labor’s 42.6% in the Lord Mayoral contest.

The Elliott election campaign was clearly not as well bank-rolled as Jeff McCloy’s 2012 campaign, and almost certainly suffered from its association in voters’ minds with the discredited McCloyal bloc, despite the involvement of local “celebrity” candidates such as former NBN news-reader and Liberal candidate John Church, who won a seat in Ward 1, and former jockey Allan Robinson, who retained his Ward 4 seat.

They are joined by Elliott, who won a councillor seat in Ward 2, and Andrea Rufo, who held his Ward 3 position, making them the second largest political bloc on the new council.

The big losers were the Liberals, whose council representation dropped from four (one in each ward) to a solitary Ward 2 position, held by Liberal council stalwart Brad Luke.

The Liberal Party’s council campaign imploded very publicly, due partly to procedural and internal factional issues which resulted in the party disendorsing its Lord Mayoral candidate and its entire Ward 3 and Ward 4 teams, and partly from growing voter dissatisfaction with State and Federal Coalition governments. They, too, almost certainly suffered from their close association with the McCloyal bloc.

The Greens council representation fell from two to one, though their vote was relatively stable - slightly up from their 2012 result in the Lord Mayoral contest and in Wards 2 and 3, and slightly down in Wards 1 and 4.

Locally, The Greens have struggled to match the electoral successes they enjoyed in the 1990s and early 2000s, when they achieved 3 and 4 council seats, and drove a policy agenda that placed Newcastle Council at the forefront of local government innovation and achievement. In the 2008, 2012 and 2017 council elections they won 1, 2 and 1 seats respectively, and their influence on council policy setting and organisational culture has declined commensurately.

The sole Greens representative on the new council will be John Mackenzie, who took over the safe Ward 1 seat from retiring three-term councillor Michael Osborne.

Dr Mackenzie is an experienced and skilled environmental campaigner and policy advisor, but has little experience with either local government or the grassroots Newcastle community. How he manages the complex internal and external political and strategic challenges associated with his position as the new local public face of The Greens will play a key role in the future of The Greens in Newcastle.

One sad consequence (at least from my perspective) was the loss of Greens Councillor Therese Doyle, who, after internal factional ructions in the local Greens group, ended up taking on the difficult challenge of holding her Ward 2 councillor seat.

Despite a tremendous campaign effort by her and her community support group that improved The Greens’ Lord Mayoral and Ward 2 vote from the 2012 election, the numbers didn’t fall her way.

In her five years on Newcastle Council, Doyle was a diligent and principled community representative who worked closely with grassroots community groups across the city to give voice to their aspirations and concerns.

Unfortunately, this kind of work isn’t always visible to the great mass of voters, particularly in large council areas such as Newcastle, and elections can be cruelly unjust in failing to appreciate such a contribution.